THE MASTER’S MATE’S YARN. (continued 2)

“When I awoke, I knew, if it were only by the dull glimmer of the cabin-lamp, and the capers the rats were cutting along the deck, that it must be near the hour when Captain Catherton had settled to call me himself. Looking across the cabin to his berth I saw that it was empty, and feeling sure that he was on deck, I again closed my eyes against the light. However, the mood was past for the time, and between the smell of the oil, the rats and the roaches, and the captain, as I supposed, walking the deck over my head, I found it useless to close an eyelid. So, gentlemen, I lay wide awake listening to the tramp above, as of some one in a spell of deep thought, and watching the pranks of the long-tailed gentry as they manœuvred around the stands of arms on the bulkhead, or marched in squads under the berths; the boldest of them climbing up repeatedly into the foot of mine, and plumping down again when I stirred, as if they were bent upon rousing me out for some end of their own, which, as I afterward discovered, was for free admission into a cabinet of marine curiosities, which the mate, who was dead and gone, had been collecting for some scientific gentlemen of the Granite state. Where the rats came from should have been submitted to these same savants, when, as I heard afterward, they boarded every ship which come into Bedford Bay for months after the Tartar was expected home, inquiring after their curiosity-box, then lying snugly enough at the bottom of the cove of Muscat.

[Conclusion in our next.